DEVAS, CHARLES STANTON. - English economist of the Christian social school, b. at Woodside (Old Windsor) on 26 Aug. 1848, d. in London on 6 Nov. 1906. In 1876 he published a pamphlet entitled Labour and Capital in England from the Catholic point of view (London), and in 1892 his principal work Political Economy (4th ed.).
Even in his first pamphlet he reveals the characteristics that distinguish his scholarly and journalistic work, as a contributor to the Dublin Review: a marked reaction against the unnatural separation of economic science from morality, the application of Catholic morality to political and economic questions, and concern for the dangers of State socialism in contrast to the bold conclusions of the Bishop of Nottingham, Edward G. Bagshaw, who in some famous pastoral letters and speeches to Catholic congresses had not only accepted the theories of Cardinal Manning but had gone even further, formulating a veritable programme of State socialism. In the dispute between protectionists and free-traders, he took his stand for a moderate intervention by the State, expressing his thought most clearly especially in the introduction to the new edition of J. B. Byles’s Sophisms of Free-Trade (London 1903).